Abstract
The two-way typology proposed by Leonard Talmy has been extremely influential in the past few decades, and has led to a large number of publications. But while the majority of the literature is devoted to the identification of the verb-framed or satellite-framed status of individual languages, relatively little (if any) research focuses on the foundation of this theory. This article addresses the nature of the macro-event, a fundamental concept for the Talmyan two-way typology, proposing a diachronic aspect of the macro-event, an aspect that seems to be under-appreciated or even neglected. It argues that a macro-event results from the integration of two simpler events through grammaticalization in Mandarin. This hypothesis is supported by the behavior of directional complements in Mandarin Chinese in that these directional complements in combination with the main verbs can express all the five types of the macro-events that Talmy has analyzed to establish his typology, and that these macro-events themselves represent an integration of two simpler events and exhibit various degrees of grammaticalization. This study brings together two seemingly unrelated areas of research, that is, the area of event structure and that of grammaticalization, thus providing a new perspective on the Talmyan typological paradigm. The result, though supported by the data in Mandarin Chinese, might have universal value and implications for other languages as well.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to express his gratitude to Leonard Talmy for his comments in shaping the idea, to the four anonymous reviewers in helping the author to improve the manuscript to the current readability, and to Editor-in-chief, John Newman, and Assistant Editor, Claudia Heinrich, for their encouragement through the whole process of revision, to Sherman Wilcox, for his reading through the whole manuscript, to Na Liu and Guannan Zhao for adding the Chinese tone diacritics, and to all my doctoral students for reading the final galley proof meticulously. Any errors remain as the author’s responsibility. This study was funded by the National Social Science Foundation project (18BYY170), entitled “The principles of event integration: A case study on directional complements in Chinese”.
List of abbreviations
- CL
classifier
- DE
attributive particle “的” (de)
- DUR
durative aspect,”在” (zài)
- GEI
passive marker, “给” (gěi)
- LOC
locative
- LE
perfective aspect, “了” (le)
- PL
plural form
- PFV
perfective
- PREP
preposition
- ZHE
continuative aspect marker, “着” (zhe)
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